The machine question was a national issue particular to the early nineteenth century. Though it cannot be said to have died away by the mid nineteenth century, both its context and significance had changed. Machinery certainly remained an issue in individual industries, especially as the hand techniques still dominant in many industries were gradually replaced by mechanical ones. But there was little generalisation on the basis of these experiences, and the various social groups no longer singled out machinery per se to attack or to extoll in quite the same way. For the great Victorian boom brought not just mechanisation, but expansion in all ways. The intensive employment of manual and skilled labour was as much a hallmark of the mid-Victorian economy as was large-scale capital formation and rapid mechanisation.

The Machinery Question can be said to have reached its culmination in political economy and radical theory in the 1840s. The debate on industrialisation had arisen in a specific economic situation, for machinery made its entry and advance in the context of a series of economic crises which recurred throughout the period from 1815 to 1848. The stability and prosperity of the mid-Victorian economy resolved the contradictory juxtaposition of industrialisation and economic depression. The social antagonisms which had called the benefits and directions of this industrialisation into question no longer took on such spontaneous and apocalyptic forms, as workers and employers became organised into trade unions, the anti Corn Law League, and other intermediating bodies.